4 new members were admitted to our Bar on January 30th in a ceremony held in the Franklin County Judicial Center. Please join us in welcoming Michaela E. Zanis law clerk to President Judge Meyers, Travis A. Carbaugh of the District Attorney's office, Kyle D. Thomas of the District Attorney's office, and Holden E. Sweger of MidPenn Legal Services.

The Franklin County Bar Association is pleased to announce that we are creating a new bench & bar composite picture in 2023. Our last composite picture was 2012. We invite you to participate in this year’s group photo. We are working with LA Cameras, a local photographer. You’ll be able to schedule your sitting, view your photo, pay the sitting fee, and order any prints directly with LA Cameras.

Please call LA Cameras at (717) 263-0043 to schedule your appointment. LA Cameras is located at 1019 Wayne Avenue, Chambersburg, PA 17201.

The available time slots are:

February 7^th: 9am – 2pm & 3pm – 6pm

February 9^th: 9am – 2pm & 3pm – 6pm

February 15^th: 9am – 2pm & 3pm – 6pm

February 17^th: 9am – 2pm & 3pm – 6pm

March 20^th: 9am – 2pm & 3pm – 6pm

March 23^rd: 9am – 2pm & 3pm – 6pm

The sitting fee is $35 per person and is due at the time of your sitting. The cost for photos is listed on the ORDER FORM. Please complete the form and take it with you to your sitting.

The IOLTA Board’s 2022 Annual Report promotes transparency in their administration of scarce public funds for civil legal aid.

 

The report features client stories from KidsVoice Pennsylvania, Neighborhood Legal Services, and Penn State Law, as well as a testimonial from an attorney at Northwestern Legal Services about the positive impact of the Loan Repayment Assistance Program on her ability to work in public service. A list of private attorneys that made voluntary donations to the IOLTA Fund in 2022 begins on page 20.

 

The IOLTA Board respectfully urges law firms to patronize our Platinum Leader Banks for their IOLTA accounts. Platinum Leader Banks voluntarily pay a premium interest rate on IOLTA accounts, thereby increasing funding available for civil legal aid. As always, any questions about the IOLTA Board may be directed to Stephanie S. Libhart.

Stephanie S. Libhart

Executive Director

Pennsylvania IOLTA Board

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

717-238-2002

The complete member list is updated quarterly and available to you and your staff two ways.

You may download and print a PDF from the members' section of our website (log in required). Or you may email Amelia at director@franklinbar.org to receive a PDF or excel document anytime.

The year is 1522 CE, in the town of Autun in Central France. An experienced attorney stands before an ecclesiastical court, which is fully prepared to try his clients. Looking around the courtroom would reveal all the expected persons save his clients. The attorney was in the often-unenviable position of having been appointed by the Court, to represent difficult and unhelpful clients. Since his appointment, his clients have only rarely appeared at his office and even then these meetings have been brief and unhelpful. For a lesser advocate his client’s behavior may have proved disastrous, but not for our attorney. He knows that his clients, if convicted, face the church’s harshest punishments: excommunication, and anathema, which he believes would lead to their destruction. This is particularly problematic because the indictment and summons explicitly allow the accused to be tried in absentia if they fail to appear. 

The attorney has anticipated his clients’ refusal to appear and comes prepared. He is an expert on procedure and jurisdiction and will use every creative argument in his considerable repertoire in the attempt to save his clients.  He argues at great length that the summons to appear before the court was deficient. It was read only once and only in the center of Autun. His clients, meanwhile, were spread across the entire region. Therefore, many of the accused would have had no knowledge of the hearing and it would be unjust to convict them without such knowledge. While the townsfolk of Autun seem convinced of the accused’s guilt, the Judge who presides over the case insists on scrupulously following the rules and fairness towards the accused. The Judge agrees that the summons was defective and grants a continuance. For several months the summons will be read out during every church service in the region. After such extensive notice no future refusal to appear by the accused could be justified on notice grounds.  

Several months later, when the Court reconvened, the accused again fail to appear to answer the charges. The prosecuting attorney urged the Judge to begin the trial in absentia and he seemed inclined to do so. Fortunately for the accused, their attorney was far from done. His clients were of course reluctant to appear in court because individuals among the townsfolk would attack them if they tried. His clients where unpopular and had good reason to fear the townsfolk. It was not safe for his clients to show themselves, as doing so risked death. In such cases, he argued, the Court must provide safe conduct or even an armed escort to protect his vulnerable clients. After what one imagines was a heated exchange between both sides, the Judge again agreed with the Defense. He would not order an armed escort but required the townspeople of Autun to keep under house arrest all those who might attack the accused on the day of the hearing. The townsfolk were furious by this decree and made it clear that they would not comply. The law was then clear, an accused who could not safely appear in court was permitted to refuse a summons. The defense attorney was able to turn the townsfolk’s recalcitrance into a dismissal of all charges.

The defense attorney’s name was Bartholomew Chassenée, and he would build his sterling legal reputation in part on representing similar clients. It is unclear what his clients thought about all of his efforts on their behalf. In fact it’s not entirely clear that any of them ever learned about it despite the certainty that there were a few hidden away in the court that day.  This is largely because they were the rats of the province. Their crime was stealing and destroying the barley crop. The enemies that the townsfolks refused to keep inside were the town’s cats. While it sounds crazy to a modern audience, these types of cases were not uncommon during the past and were taken all too seriously. Chassenée was far from the only attorney who would protect the local vermin from spiritual condemnation and temporal conviction.

Ecclesiastical trials against animals were, if anything, more common than the secular trials against animals covered in my last article. These trials would be common until the 18^th century, at which point they became increasingly rare. Unlike trials against animals by secular courts that persist to this day, ecclesiastical trials of animals have died out in the modern age. 

 It will be useful to examine the characteristics of these trials. First, they were exclusively used against classes of animals rather than specific individuals. Surviving accounts of the trials of rats, locusts, mice, moles, beetles, snails, weevils, flies, bumblebees, caterpillars, slugs, eels, and many more vermin besides, paint a colorful picture of these odd events.  Chassenée defended all of the rats in the region that had collectively done much harm to the harvest. Secular courts were not well equipped to deal this such cases. It would have been impossible to cite and arrest every rat who had damaged the crops. If they were so easy to find there would be no need for the trials. Furthermore, proving each individual rat had caused damage would be impossible.  Rather than arresting a murderous sow and holding her in jail until the trial, these vermin would be summoned to appear in court. It was not seriously expected that the vermin would appear but rather that their advocates would represent them. The advocates were provided at the community’s expense because, as we have seen, due process was thought important. Both religious ritual and jurisprudence share the idea that without the proper forms being followed the results are defective if not utterly meaningless. For such rituals to be effective all the proper forms needed to be meticulously followed. Otherwise, they were just so many words. 

The case against the vermin was generally proceeded by a thorough investigation to determine the nature of the culprits and whether their conduct was sanctionable. Such investigations were often accompanied by prayers, acts of penance, and other religious events in the belief that such pestilence were punishment from God for the communities’ sins. In 1545 CE, the town of St. Julien in France credited public prayers, which laid out the town’s many sins, for driving out the weevils that ravaged their vineyards.  

Generally, the offending animals would be given notice to quit the affected territory or to move on to less destructive locales. If they moved of their own accord (whether in response to these commandments or not) no more would be said. If they persisted, few other options were available other than religious courts. Such courts were used to dealing with wide, sweeping heresies and other religious issues that affected broad classes of people. Ecclesiastical courts were important because of the very real problems presented by such vermin and the lack of any effective remedies against them. A plague of locusts or slugs could cause hunger, famine, and death. Farming and pest control options available to medieval society could barely be called rudimentary. In a world before pesticides and modern efficient traps, only manual labor, other animals (as likely to damage your crops and stores as to kill the pests) and superstition were available to challenge pestilence. Exorcism, sprinkling of holy water, and an increasingly more dubious list of folk remedies were the primary options. In the face of disaster and ruin, people turned to the only power they believed could aid them: The Church.  

Since the animals were not incarcerated, it was necessary to summon them before the court. Such summons generally followed the same requirements as in human cases. While the several months of notice Chassenée was able to secure for his clients may have been excessive, significant attention was given to making sure the vermin were aware of the charges against them. Public proclamations were made at the places where the offending vermin were known to gather. In 1487 CE, Autun was again beset, but this time by slugs. Public processions were made on three consecutive days throughout the entire area, urging the slugs to leave less they be cursed. In the 15^th Century, when the flies of Mainz, Germany, failed to appear, their attorney was replaced with a more skilled advocate to help avoid further delays. Those whose failure to appear could not be excused by counsel would be tried in absentia. 

           Attorneys for the accused, as is often the case now, generally sought to avoid trial by any means available to them. Their clients were rarely sympathetic, and much pressure could be brought upon the court to convict such dangerous menaces. When such efforts failed, an attorney would do well to be a skilled theologian. Vermin are a difficult question doctrinally because they were considered to be creations of God and part of his overall design. Many respected church theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, held that vermin could not be tried at all because they were only fulfilling the purpose for which they had been created. Appeals to their lack of free will and ability to think could also be effective. Seemingly mindless grasshoppers do not appear, on the surface, to have the state of mind to commit a crime. This logic was often countered by biblical understanding that humans had been placed over animals and had dominion over them. Therefore, when vermin began destroying crops in opposition to humans, they were no longer fulfilling their God-given role and were subject to censure. Vermin where also not infrequently decried as servants of the devil, or at least his tools, with which to punish the faithful. To be clear these are vastly simplified summaries of theological arguments that were of profound and often unreasonable complexity.

      Strangely enough, settlement negotiations were also known to take place. In 1587 CE, the weevils returned to St. Julien and no amount of prayer and warnings could see them off. The weevils were ably represented in court by Antoine Filliol. Fillio argued that the God placed the weevils on Earth and would not have done so without providing them with ample food, in this case the grapes. The villagers, in a truly creative move, took him at his word. They officially set aside a piece of land near the town for the weevils, on condition that they leave the farmers’ grapes alone. The humans would be able to cross the land and use its springs, but it otherwise would belong to the weevils. Fillio was forced to decline on behalf of his clients because he felt the land was not of good quality and would not have provided sufficient food. One imagines a probably exasperated prosecutor arguing the merits of the weevils’ land, “being full of trees and shrubs of divers kinds.” The case would drag on for eight months before the judge finally made a decision. The decision is lost to history because (and I must again stress that I am not making this up) the paper it was written on was destroyed by vermin. I like to imagine some unhappy weevils excising the judge’s decision from history. 

Convicted vermin would face the Church’s most powerful spiritual sanction: Anathema. Anathema is a religious ritual that curses and marks its object for divinely inspired destruction. Had the intended target been human they would also have been excommunicated, but animals were not seen as a part of the Christian community and therefore could not be removed from it. Despite this seeming contradiction, it was not unheard of for the vermin to also be excommunicated, perhaps for thoroughness’s sake. Anathema conveniently could be applied more generally to people, animals, fields, and/or objects. The only limit seems to have been the particular prelate’s imagination. 

After conviction, the vermin were often given one final opportunity to leave within a certain period to avoid destruction. The beetles that destroyed the French town of Troyes’ crops were given six days to flee, and the slugs destroying the French city of Beaujeu’s grapes received only three. This threat and the divinely inspired smiting that it promised carried great power in medieval Europe. Many contemporary sources, including Chassenée, attest to the perceived power of these curses.  Chassenée writes at length about an orchard so cursed that it would not bear fruit for many years until the anathema was lifted, at which point the fruit returned. If you’re wondering why an orchard would be cursed, it’s because it lured children away from Mass to eat its fruit. The faith in anathema really isn’t surprising when you think about it. If you cast enough curses on enough vermin some of them will leave or die, seemingly by design. Few infestations last forever. The ineffective rituals were seen as defective in some way and further efforts were needed. The Church helpfully advocated increased tithing as a sure-fire way of making these rituals more effective. This practice’s efficacy is unclear. Anathema would persist as a canonical sanction until the 20^th century, but its practice has since been permanently abolished.  

Chassenée would go on to be a prominent attorney within medieval France. He published a number of works on legal matters, including the trial and defense of animals. He felt that there was nothing odd or wrong about trying animals like Autun’s rats so long as they were given a rigorous defense before an impartial tribunal. He would be reminded of his arguments in defense of Autun’s rats near the end of his life, while the High Judge of Provencal. Chassenée’s court had convicted and order the suppression of a village containing a large number of Vaudois, a heretical Christian sect against which several crusades would be called in the 15^th and 16^th century. A friend advocating for the Vaudois argued that the supposed heretics had not been given a sufficient opportunity to respond to the court’s summons, “Will you believe that the condition of so many poor people, of whom you are the judge, will be worse than that of the vile animals you defended?” Chassenée was apparently moved by his own precedent and delayed enforcement of the Court’s Order. For the reminder of his life Chassenée prevented harm form befalling this group of Vaudios as he had Autun’s rats so many years before. Unfortunately, with Chassenée dead, the Vaudios lacked an advocate as skilled and diligent as the defender of the rats of Autun, and their sect was destroyed.

Welcome by the court by President Judge Meyers. Pictured left to right: Honorable Angela R. Krom, Honorable Mary Beth Shank, Honorable Todd M. Sponseller, Honorable Shawn D. Meyers, and Honorable Jeremiah D. Zook.

Michaela E. Zanis presented by Hon. Shawn D. Meyers.

Kyle D. Thomas (left) and Travis A. Carbaugh (middle) presented by Matthew D. Fogal.

Holden E. Sweger presented by Brandon M. Copeland.

Court administers the attorney’s oath to candidates.